Indispensable

The following is a chapter of a short book I am writing about my grandfather, Orrick Johns, and the first half of the 20th Century. He was born in 1887 in St. Louis, Missouri. He was equivalent to Millennial in his time. He was the Lost Generation—the first generation to come of age in the 20th Century. What they remembered of the 19th Century is what we remember, just as everyone born after 1980 will get to define the memory of the 20th Century. Orrick Johns was a successful writer, poet and playwright who who rubbed elbows with most of the literary names and legendary figures of his time, and he was forgotten. The following is part of an investigation into the process of history that left behind my grandfather.

For anyone who is curious as to how Donald Trump will be remembered in the future, look up Warren G. Harding. If you are unfamiliar with that name, you have got the idea. The Great Beast [that is the voting public] is not fond of embarrassment, and tries to forget it as soon as possible. Covid will be as forgotten as the influenza pandemic was, and Trump will be forgotten with it. He is not indispensable.

Few people can resist the delusion of indispensable fame, and Orrick was no exception. In Italy, he stayed in the villa of Rose O'Brien. I knew she was famous in his day because there was no introduction, he just dropped the name. So I looked her up. For thirty years the American public could not get enough of her Kewpie cartoon character, a cute baby whose name was inspired by Cupid. A comic strip, ads, posters, dolls—the works. O'Brien made so much money that she could support her whole family, a large entourage and several properties. Then the Depression set in and illustration gave way to photography. The American public went off Kewpie. O'Brien was near broke when she died in 1944. By the 50s, she was all but forgotten.

This process of forgetting seems very much under way for the biggest stars of the Baby Boom, including those who played the four central characters in Reds. John Reed was played by Warren Beatty, a name and a face largely dated to movies of the 1970s, and unlikely to mean anything to a Post-80 [anyone born after 1980.] Emma Goldman was played by Maureen Stapleton. A lot of people could not name her at the time, and she is not helped by the fact that her character was so much less memorable than the woman she was based on.

Eugene O’Neill was played by Jack Nicholson. He usually performed the kind of characters who get cancelled on social media. Women a third of his age ran after him in real life and in movies for being rich, powerful, famous—and let's face it—for looking kind of evil. He brought out the Twilight in young women of the 1970s and 80s, and the 50 Shades of Grey in their mothers. (If you don't believe me, look up a movie called The Witches of Eastwick.) But Post-80s women have publicly sworn to Handmaid's Tale from now on—indeed they bristle at the very idea that any woman has ever read any other kind of book—so they would have denounced Nicholson years ago for sexual mis-assault-harassment-conduct if they had any idea who the hell he was.

Louise Bryant was played by Diane Keaton. The role that defined Keaton’s career and gave her the best chance of remaining in the film school division of the academic mausoleum was Annie in Annie Hall. Of course, the movie was made by Woody Allen, so we are at least looking at a moratorium on remembering Diane Keaton. I suspect when America lurches back into a Greek phase—or at least when all the key players in the Woody Allen drama are dead , and there is nothing to go on but court records—his movies will see a quiet revival, as the details of his life return to a more obscure place in the cycle of American forgetting.

The crypt keepers of academia have short memories for the gossipy personal stories of the artist, and long memories for the story of the art. The 20th Century is a coming-of-age story for film, one of the few arts that has an exact century in which it was born and raised. Similar to The Lost Cause movies, Woody Allen movies are indispensable to the plot. So is Leni Riefenstahl. 

Her film, Olympia, about the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, was not a straight up Nazi propaganda film like her Triumph of the Will in 1934—but let’s just say it was very, very Nazi-ish. How much Leni may have supported, aided and abetted one of the greatest crimes in history is a matter of debate, but her innovative use of tracking shots in Olympia was brilliant. She defended Hitler after Kristallnacht, and if Woody ever broke a Jewish window, it probably belonged to his Bubbe—so anyone who thinks he will be forgotten should keep in mind the high bar set by Leni. She is indispensable.

So is Charlie Chaplin. He married a few underage girls and, like Woody, went into European exile, but he remains the only person in history who can still make a Hitler mustache look adorable. This is good news for Diane Keaton because she was adorable in Annie Hall, and she will never be remembered for her excellent performance as the shrill, dilettantish, Louise Bryant. Reds is like that character in the book who gets cut when it is condensed for the screenplay. Great character; not necessary to the plot—dispensable. Which leaves me trying to find answers about forgotten people in a book by a forgotten man by exploring a movie that is on its way to being forgotten. 

I don’t mind the role of Don Quixote, though. My whole life is tilting at windmills, and Reds was the best thing I could find to use as a pole star by which to navigate the process of forgetting that wrote my grandfather out of the script of history.

Throughout the course of Reds, there are interview responses from people called witnesses. Their names are not presented below their images, but rather stacked in the credits like they might appear on a mass grave. Their faces are cracked and ancient. They are real but their testimony often seems tangential and speculative, romanticized, yet almost beside the point. 

Are they acting as witnesses, or are they witnesses acting? 

Orrick’s witnessing [in his 1937 book, Time of Our Lives] has the advantage of being written closer to events like the Book of Mark. He does not yet know which names and what events will pan out as indispensable. In the same way, much of Mark seems like its author or authors are unclear on the issue of the godhood of Jesus, so they concentrate on the events of the man—and men and women. The witnessing in Reds is more like the Book of John, where the godhood of Jesus is certain, and the man is near lost.

I use that analogy deliberately. The pedigreed peasantry would hate this idea, especially in the wake of the popularity of New Atheism, but a secular American who does not understand the Bible is like a Russian who has no knowledge of communism, or a Turk ignorant of Islam and the Sultanate which made an obscure people great. Orrick delves into his reading of the Bible the way he does any other piece of literature, or any other author or philosopher whose name he drops. He is typical of a pedigreed peasant of the Left, incapable of understanding that he is reading a document as inescapable in the West—and America in particular—as Confucianism is in China. Even worse, more of that document is at the root of leftism than many leftists dare admit.

Dorothy Day may have gone too far for some by accepting the faith, but she correctly understood the connection between her proletarian ideals and the New Testament. In her Catholic Worker Movement was perhaps an understanding that the primary reason Christianity became so entrenched in the Roman Empire was that it addressed the people of the dirt directly, as if to plant them like seeds. It is nearly impossible to make the pedigreed peasants of Society understand how powerful this has been historically to the people of the dirt. It is so powerful that churches for centuries thought it better to give the liturgy in Latin or Greek. The upheaval of the Protestant Reformation was the direct result of the liturgy increasingly being translated into local languages, where people could hear from the pulpit exactly what was in the book. In turn, Protestant churches found out they had to invent new ways control the liturgy, like encouraging parishioners to leave its interpretation in the hands of pastors. The frenzy of schisms across the history of Christianity since the Reformation—which finds little comparison in either Judaism or Islam—has shown that this strategy has only limited potential. For the people of the dirt, the New Testament remains a time bomb. 

In a scenario that seems like a cliche out of 19th Century fiction, it seems I am a secret scion born among the masses, which explains a lot. I grew up with the Bible bomb, and with my preternatural sensibility to never take anything at face value, I was faced with at least four choices: 1) I could go the way of right wing religious fervor, the Book of John, Revelation and Joshua and the Prophets—Manifest Destiny; American Exceptionalism; the New Israelites; God’s Chosen; 2) I could go the way of compassion and forgiveness of Christian Left focused on Matthew, Mark, Luke, Acts and the Epistles—Exodus and Abolition; 3) I could become an angry New Atheist, but my father was one of those long before it was called that. It worked horribly for him, and by extension, me; 4) I could choose to learn what was actually in the Bible so I could try and understand my country and its history.

I chose the liberal sentiments of the Christian Left, came down firmly as a God-curious agnostic, and, lastly, but most importantly, chose the fourth path—to understand. Since it is hard to know in which direction the Bible will explode, it is best to know what makes it tick. I had good teachers in great discussions with Vira and her family, though they were hardly aware of it. What I did not have was the privilege of being an Orrick and waving it all off. I did not get the privilege of pretending the US could be understood through Greek ideas and Roman history—The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as read to me as a child by my father to show me (incorrectly) how Christianity merely destroyed civilization. I chose to accept that, for better and worse, in America, when the Great Beast twists and kicks and stomps, its Book of Whispers is the Bible, not Nietzsche or Plato or Marx or Proudhon. Even among those four, only Plato had not heard of, or drawn from, those Whispers. You can understand the US fine without Greek philosophy, but the Bible is indispensable. 

I see it in liberals and leftists all the time, their utter bafflement at the behavior of the Great Beast, and their preposterous attempts to explain it, yet they are every bit a susceptible to, you might say, biblical behavior. New England and the Northeast have proclaimed their secularism for longer than any other part of the country. Indeed, only a Canadian could mistake New England as fertile ground for the center of a new theocracy, as Margaret Atwood does in The Handmaid’s Tale. (If you are going to do that, it’s the South, and the Southern woman, as we saw earlier with the Lost Cause, would be the key to pulling it all together.) Yet in every other presidential election, the Northeast, and particularly New England, swoons over a candidate promising the way, the truth and the light. Bernie Sanders in his rumpled suits and flyaway hair in a parody of John the Baptist preparing the way to a New Jerusalem. In Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson was professor as prophet, the Jeremiah unheeded, whose high-minded principles for a League of Nations and Self-Determination of Nations were watered down after the end of the First World War. (Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.) Jesus tossing tables in the Temple is just the earliest recorded incidence of the anarchist protest tactic of direct action. And so was feeding the poor. Your average campus hippie would love to believe that nonviolence was a recent import from Ghandi but Quakers in 17th Century England got it from the New Testament and brought it to America. The communist ideology of the inevitability of the dictatorship of the proletariat is simply “the meek shall inherit the earth” restated. In Acts 2:44-45 is a straight up description of communism. 

And all that believed were together, and had all things common;

And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.

If all of America ever finally answers “none” on the question of their religious affiliation—the great dream of New Atheism, the end of the opiate of the masses—Americans will still lash out in fervent moral panics, turning on each other in searing judgment until America, the Latter Day Israel, is cleansed of … 

Well, I had thought those days were over. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, moral panics over rock n' roll, rap, devil worship and gays were driven by evangelicals. Moral panics over drugs, communism, crime, counter culture and race were largely secular, but scratch the surface and there was a church. With the fall from grace of Christian evangelists in the late 1980s, it seemed those days were over. But Society 21.2 proved that the Left is fully capable of moral panic. They are cleansing the media of apostates of Intersectional Feminism and Critical Race Theory one celebrity at a time. 

This too shall pass, and Society 21.3 will say again: Judge not lest ye be judged. (Let's get Greek, so we have more sins to wash away!)

In the East, things simply don’t work like this. In China, the masses rise and crest and wash a new regime over the country, or they fail and recede. The movement of masses, the collective, is built into the Confucian system. Individualism has traditionally been a completely alien concept, and since China's humiliating encounter with the West, it remains suspect and foreign. The smallest unit of Chinese society is the extended family, not the individual. To understand the differences between West and East, I made up the Plisskin Scale, named after Snake Plisskin, hero of John Carpenter’s Escape from New York. He was an individual who provided the key to all the action, and the solution to all problems. He was working for a reward, and only serves others by way of serving himself. This is a typical individualistic hero in American movies. 

The opposite is the Japanese classic, Seven Samurai. None of the seven are the only solution for every problem, and they all must work together. Each has a fatal flaw. There is a master but he is just as dispensable as any other member of the team. All sacrifice for the many, with the expectation of nothing for themselves. This is pure collectivism, and typical across East Asia.

The Plisskin Scale broadly follows a west to east trajectory moving from most individualistic to most collectivist. The US gets one Plisskin. Moving east, England gets one and a half Plisskins. All Anglophone countries fall somewhere between the US and the UK because individualism is less a universal value than an English cultural quirk. This is the subtext of Noel Coward's “Mad Dogs and Englishmen.” Ostensibly, he is suggesting the English must be crazy for ignoring the near universal custom of taking a nap during the high noon heat, and going for a walk instead. And of course, the suggestion of the industrious Englishman against the lazy native. But he is also pointing with some pride to English non-conformity and, by extension, individualism. He makes very clear how bizarre it is in other cultures, and he is right.

Proceeding east, the countries of the Eurozone would range between two and five on the scale, with Germany perhaps a five, and Italy maybe a two. China, Japan and Korea represent between nine and ten on the scale, with China as the cultural exporter of collectivism in the manner England and individualism. In Confucian thought, stability rather than schism is the rule. Whatever dynasty ends up in the palace by whatever means, it is The Will of Heaven, and the bureaucracy carries on. The Communists in Beijing are really just The Red Dynasty. They tried to free China from Confucian thinking and failed. They finally accepted it was indispensable.

Countries, like people, adapt to new conditions and apply new strategies, but they do not change. From the end of the 19th Century, the Turks tried to free themselves from the mentality of Islam and the autocracy of the Sultanate to become more “European”— they failed again and again. They lurch back and forth, and as of 2021 are in an Ottoman phase. The Russians oscillate between opening to the West, and retreating inward akin to the centralized autocratic model of China, ruthlessly controlling every state its borders—the Lenin and the Stalin, the Christ and the Confucian. 

The West has failed again and again at freeing itself of the Christian mentality. Not even Islam comes close to loving martyrs like the West. Absolutely anyone can be a martyr in the West. Every idea is inevitably affixed to an icon, a word rooted practice of sainthood, which almost always involved martyrdom. Vincent van Gogh, patron saint of misunderstood genius artists, martyr to a cruel world which just couldn’t understand him. Nikola Tesla, patron saint of misunderstood genius engineers, who died a penniless martyr to a greedy world which did not recognize his extraordinary value to all of mankind. Jimmy Hendrix, Janice Joplin and Jim Morrison became martyrs to the The Sixties simply by drugging themselves to death. Absolutely anyone can become a martyr in the West. 

In Arab history, people have names and achievements, but they don’t have personal stories. They don’t have the little quirks and flaws that give them the feel of human beings. They are like George Washington, a man who knew he was writing his letters for the ages, so he kept himself aloof, godlike, as if always fully formed. Not like Lincoln—broody, doubtful, and capable of a dirty joke or two. The saints are individuals. There are ten thousand saints from Augustine to Dorothy Day (if they ever make her a saint) and each has their own story, though most of them are lost in time. In this way, they are both individuals and masses. They are the West.

There was a time when John Reed was an icon, and he became a martyr for the Red Revolution in Russia. Entombed like Jesus under the Kremlin. Reds is about Americans and made for Americans, so it has to be about individuals, and yet it is about Communism, where there are no individuals, so the old witnesses testify in the movie to create a sense of masses, ten thousand saints, and they name names...

“I know that Jack went around with Mabel Dodge, and then he went around with another gal, and then he went around with Louise Bryant…Never forgot Emma Goldman. She inspired me to the very depths. And Max Eastman was a beloved man. The real radical, a free spirit…Floyd Dell was one of them. He wrote novels, beautiful novels...The radicals included people in the IWW and Bill Haywood...And there were Walter Lippmann, and Lincoln Steffens and Isadora Duncan and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Alfred Stieglitz…Oh, and Margaret Sanger. And, of course, the great writer Eugene O’Neill...”

Elsewhere in the movie: Susan Glaspell. The Provincetown Players. Armory Show of 1913.

I italicized every name Orrick dropped that matches with the testimony of the witnesses. I am going to separate out those names and rain them into the paragraph below:

Jack (John Reed.)  Mabel Dodge, Emma Goldman, Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, Bill Haywood, Lincoln Steffens, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell. 

I’m going to remove some raindrops, now, leaving only the ones who are both mentioned by Orrick, and who appear as characters in Reds. The list is now: John Reed, Emma Goldman, Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, Bill Haywood, Eugene O’Neill.

Did you notice who is missing?

Reds is ostensibly about John Reed, the American who went to Russia and documented a revolution in Ten Days That Shook the World. The movie, however, is like a wheel that turns around Louise Bryant. Earlier, I placed in the first name drop: Armory Show of 1913. Both Reds and Orrick mention this show. The show was arranged by Mabel Dodge, art patron and paramour of John Reed before Louise Bryant. In the first act of the movie, Bryant is rewriting an article about the show, getting nowhere after three years. Reed throws this in her face in the midst of one of their many quarrels. Orrick was in Greenwich Village in 1913. He mentioned the show and the new art from Europe that it introduced into the US. He did not mention Louise Bryant. Granted, for all intents and purposes, she only arrived from Oregon in January 1916, so her connection to the show was very indirect. 

In the first name drop, I mention The Provincetown Players. In the summer of 1915, Provincetown, Massachusetts was a fishing village occupied by Portuguese immigrants, and a new influx from Greenwich Village. On July 22nd, a group of New York bohemians had gathered in the home of Neith Boyce and Hutchins Hapgood. They felt tired of the tripe on Broadway. They wanted to write and produce plays that had more artistic value. That night, Neith Boyce presented a one-act play, and another was presented by Susan Glaspell (name-dropped above) and George “Cram” Cook. This spontaneous beginning became a pivotal moment in the development of American theater. The Provincetown Players would, as Orrick wrote [in his book Time of Our Lives], turn “out actors and stage directors and designers whose names...were a powerful influence on the drama of the country.” The legend goes that it was the beginning of off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway and regional theater.

It is a great little story all tied up with a bow. It shows that the crypt keepers of academia love a great story as much as anyone because in a key point, it is not true. In that summer of 1915, Orrick was in Grantwood, New Jersey, [writing for a publication that would feature some of the most celebrated poets of the early 20th Century] but he has a different take on the origin of the Provincetown Players. It begins at least a year before [in Greenwich Village] when, “A small group, led by Floyd [Dell] and George “Cram” Cook, began to produce short plays, written by themselves, in the Liberal Club. Out of that beginning grew both the Washington Square Players...and the Provincetown Players, which first produced Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell….”

Here you see the usual suspects, George “Cram” Cook and Susan Glaspell, but rather than spontaneously writing one-acts on July 22nd of 1915, they had already been doing that with Floyd Dell at least in 1914, when the Washington Square Players was formally established. I had intended to use Orrick’s take on the beginning of the Provincetown Players as a demonstration of how Orrick might be an unreliable narrator. Three things biased me toward this idea: 1) Perhaps unfairly, I did not like the way he repeated the contemporary prevailing historical wisdom of the Lost Cause; 2) I was aware that he was a drunk and his memory might not be reliable; 3) I read a New York Times review which said Time of Our Lives was an entertaining read unless you knew what actually happened. 

My approach has been like a detective questioning Reds in one room and questioning Orrick in another. I have been harder on Orrick because I wanted to fight any family bias I might have. I always look outside of either of my suspects before I put words to page, and it turns out, Orrick is more reliable than I gave him credit for. The Provincetown Players story of July 22nd 1915 is true, but it is like a pretty flower where we are asked to ignore the roots. Indeed, those roots are in the Washington Square Players, just as Orrick said.

In Reds, Louise Bryant and Eugene O’Neill appear in Provincetown in the summer of 1916. That means it is the “second season” of the Players. Orrick only mentions O’Neill as joining that year. During the Provincetown scene in Reds, John Reed is in St. Louis at the Democratic Convention. I have established that he was staying with Orrick. In Time of Our Lives, Orrick expands upon Reed's stay by adding what seems like a eulogy. He writes: “...I saw John Reed many times; in the summer of 1919 before he went to Russia to meet his end by typhus, I saw him nearly every day. He seemed to me a creative force rather than a great intelligence…. The things that stood out about him were his big lunging youth, his audacity, speed, and his wide and sensitive human sympathies. I remember no thoughtful conversations in which he went to the bare bones of the logic of things, as men like Steffens, Minor and Dreiser would do. But Reed wrote one of the greatest eye-witness reports of a revolution that has ever been done…”

Orrick seems to be saying that John Reed is more of a broad strokes kind of guy, and maybe a little superficial. Not being starstruck by an icon can sometimes indicate a person who has actually met him, a person who has seen up close the imperfections of the legend. But the image that makes Reed’s existence come alive for me as Orrick’s personal acquaintance is “lunging youth.” Those visceral words tell me Orrick really knew John Reed as Jack. It follows that he must have known of Bryant at least by her association with Reed. And yet it seems he would no more be inclined to drop her name than he would the partner of Emma Goldman, or Eugene O’Neill, or Floyd Dell—such as they might be. It’s as if he is certain her name is not worth dropping because when he wants to drop a name, he finds a way.

In 1921, New York was a shambles. Orrick writes, "I shall never forget the look of New York that summer after the war. It was down at heel and dilapidated as never before. Holes in the streets, dirt [probably animal feces] everywhere, taxicabs rattling like pots of old iron, express men dumped your trunks at the curb and let you carry them up yourself. No hope of getting a plumber or a carpenter, janitors defiant and always absent. If you wanted a telephone, you had to wait a year unless you had some pull with the telephone company..." The Twenties had not yet begun to roar. The post-war recession was grinding, Prohibition was closing its fingers around the throat, but due to a new tax, companies were dumping money into advertising to avoid it. Orrick started making a mint in copywriting and lost himself in gigs in New York and Boston. He missed the whole Paris scene, and while writing Time of Our Lives, he knows it. 

He was supposed to have been in Paris before any of them. In 1910, he and a friend were going to take a train to New York, then sail a yacht to Paris. The friend drowned before they ever left St. Louis. He was absent during the indispensable period in Paris, and made no connection to the two big, young indispensables at the center of it: Hemingway and Fitzgerald. But that was not going to stop one of his most contrived name drops:

“I had begun to hear from friends in Paris of the remarkable work of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway’s wife was a St Louis girl, Hadley Richardson. My young brothers Winston and John Jay had gone to Princeton with Scott Fitzgerald, and they told stories of Fitzgerald diligently taking notes at dances, suppers and teas to make sure of 'just the way they said it.' Scott Fitzgerald made the dialogue of his generation for the first time absolutely lifelike.”

I want to zero in on, Hemingway’s wife was a St Louis girl, Hadley Richardson. I get that he was suggesting that he was hearing about Hemingway from his St Louis friends through her, but it remains one of his most gratuitous name drops. 

But Louise Bryant gets nothing. 

Conversely, Orrick's meeting with DH Lawrence in Italy, when he was still writing Lady Chatterly's Lover, gets four pages. Ezra Pound gets five. Orrick knows Pound is the most indispensable person he knows. Pound was the original hipster global citizen more sophisticated than you to the point of tedious. Hipster on the Thames, hipster on the Seine—then Venice and Florence—but he really was in Paris before it became popular. And Orrick was writing him before that, when Pound was a poetry editor in London during the War.

Outrageously dressed even for today, Pound had a poof of hair on his head like a fireball, and Satan’s whiskers; he worked in clashing colors, velvet, fur, a sombrero—this was London, 1910. Like any kid born after 1980 doing their twenties in boutique Brooklyn, he was self-consciously determined to be original, but he was entering into a new age when this was still very possible. It was not just presentation—he did the work. He invented (or co-invented depending on your point of view) a new form of Modernist poetry, Imagism. If that was not enough, he is much of the reason why we know names like James Joyce, TS Elliot, Earnest Hemingway, and a bibliography of others. As Mary V. Dearborn, Hemingway’s latest biographer, wrote: “…he perhaps did more for literature than any man living in his time.”

And it was quite a time for literature. In the legend of Hemingway, it is as if he was always in Paris. Like he got out of the ambulance he was driving during the War and sat down at a cafe with Fitzgerald, where fame came to collect them. But when Hemingway first arrived from the States with a packet of recommendation letters, the man to see was Ezra Pound. Hemingway mainly wanted Pound to edit his poetry. In those days, most writers really wanted to be a poet. Prose was cerebral, like jazz in the 1950s; poetry was sexy and current like rock in the 1960s and 70s. In 1922, TS Elliot had asked Pound to edit “The Wasteland.” Pound was famously brutal with the poem, but Elliot’s attitude was: Thank you, sir, may I have another. And rightly so because it is the edit we still read today. Hemingway could not give away his poetry to editors—even, later, at the peak of his fame—but in 1922, he hoped Pound might do the trick. Pound tried but, apparently, no one is that good. 

Pound gave Hemingway a list of contacts, and history began to arrive for Hemingway. Orrick was in New York where he hit a peak in the first half of the 1920s. He had two books of poetry published, a novel and a regular gig writing for the New York Times about a still-futuristic, skyscraping New York skyline. In 1923, Margaret Anglin, another name now embalmed by academia, wanted to star in a light comedy Orrick wrote. It toured the country, and though it never found a spot on Broadway, he made a load of money. By 1926, he had money in his pocket, was closing in on forty, and What does it all mean? arrived for its midlife appointment. It was too easy to get drunk in Paris, something he actually spells out, and the scene was dead, so Orrick went to Italy.

Orrick was considered a poet, so, of course, he was ambivalent about it. He thought he maybe wanted to be a novelist. Orrick had sent Ezra Pound a copy of one of his published stories. He quotes from Pound’s letter of reply: “I’m damned if it looks to me as if you had ever seriously tried to learn to write.” A convoluted way to say: Orrick, you can’t write.

Thank you, sir, may I have another.

Orrick makes no attempt to defend himself. Instead, he records more lashes in Pound’s signature “quirky” writing style: “…IF you’re going to be a nuvvlist LEARN the bloody job.” A kick in the literary shin by Pound was something to humblebrag about. The old Mel Brooks line—It’s good to be the King—Pound knew the experience well. It gave him a lot of passes. 

In Italy, Pound invited Orrick to dinner. When Orrick said he was reading Proust, Pound spat back: “Proust is a vicious little Jew picking up everything he can find and everything he can remember.” Orrick moved right along with the conversation, as if nothing horrid requiring serious comment had just happened—as if no one among Orrick’s readers would have expected any less.

And they wouldn’t.

Pound cast a spell. He was not simply powerful. “King” is not even the right word. Dearborn uses a Yiddish word to describe Pound, fully aware of the irony. He was a literary macher, a fixer, a guy who could get you where you needed to go. He was the guy every art scene needs, the guy who glues it all together. A hundred years later, there is no art scene, just an online mob of self-aggrandizing mercenaries; no one wants to be the macher, and everyone wants to be the artist. Pound was both. And he was more. He was someone I cannot imagine existing today—if you wrote, he would read.

I cannot emphasize how huge that is, today. As late as 2010, when I said I make music, someone would say, Oh, what do you play? and even want to hear what I was doing. When I was working on my first song, “Knoxville,” someone down the hall overheard it and asked my roommate about it. People were interested in reading my first novel. As late as 2013, there was a writers’ group online, and we read each other's work and commented on it, supported each other. But something strange happened. By 2016, that year when the monster of social media reached a cruel critical mass of throwing poison everywhere, people didn’t want to read or hear anything. Isolation, hardly acknowledged because it is a sneaky thing, bred hostility. If you asked people to read or listen, they would cringe, change the subject or talk about something they were doing. Or to be polite, they would listen as if forced, or promise to read something and never get back to you. I gave someone a book, once. I put it on the coffee table. Months later it was exactly where I had put it, covered in a pile of papers. Somewhere along the line, everybody decided they were an artist genius jealous of all others, and to ask them to experience your work became offensive, as if you were saying you were better than them. The fact that you were working seemed to be rudely pointing out that the other person was not, even if their artistic ambitions amounted to little more than a sketch in their journal.

But Pound lived in exciting, new times. He believed good writing could save civilization. He would do more than read your work, edit your work and send you to the right editor. If you were broke, he would help. He covered unpaid rent. He bailed you out of jail, and he shelled out for your unpaid bills. He paid attention. If you needed a reason to live, he would find you one. He was what you needed when you needed it. He was a mench. Yiddish, again. But if you were a writer who knew Pound, it was the only possible word. There was an idealism under his anger. He cast a wide net to find good writing. For those who knew him, it was best to look away from his worst, even as it began to consume more and more of him—to say, "Oh, that Ezra!" and let it go, as Orrick did.

The need to look away began early, and not everyone did. London finally got tired of him. So he went to Paris. In Paris, only the ex-pats knew what a tedious “village explainer” he could be—and, also, what a mensch. Maybe some of them should have confronted him earlier, or more strongly. An intervention before there were interventions. But Pound was the type of guy who would only dig deeper. He was too arrogant to see his errors. He was always a dabbler in hate, but he was probably lost to it for good from June 1915, when he first heard of the death of Gaudier-Brzeska in the First World War.

That goddamn war. 

Back in the early 1910s, Benito Mussolini was growing disillusioned with the Left. He knew by heart every word and every jot of everything Marx had ever written, and he had come to the end of the possibilities of socialism. Socialists opposed the war; increasingly, he did not. Socialists saw everything as class conflict; he eventually saw blood and soil as the only thing that could trump class. While Hitler was still showing off the latest trick he had taught to his dog, Mussolini was inventing fascism. A person with a high IQ is just as likely to go with a crackpot ideology as any village idiot. It is that personality complex where a person is really smart in one way, so they think they are smart in all ways. Mussolini was probably like that; Pound was definitely like that. He was the hipster who had to have the more esoteric philosophy than you, the latest idea, the contrarian view contrarian to the contrarians. To prove he was smarter and more original. In the literary scene, everyone was socialist, communist, or anarchist. By the late 1920s, Pound and fascism met in Italy and fell in love. Like Ziggy Stardust, he took it all too far.

Mussolini ended up hanged upside down from the roof of a gas station in Milan, along with his mistress and three of his Fascist cronies. Crowds streamed by to abuse his body. There were those among them who sought revenge for martyred comrades, and those, in the way of ancient peoples, who were making a display—I, for one, welcome the New Ruler, and, of course, always hated this Tyrant. Pound was arrested by Italian partisans for his pro-Fascist radio addresses and handed over to American custody. Being a deluded narcissist, he imagined US counterintelligence might allow him on air one final time to make a statement. They put him in an outdoor cage north of Pisa for several weeks before shipping him to a Washington mental institution.

You have never seen so many writers and intellectuals going to bat for a Jew-hating, Fascist, racist traitor. To give him the legitimacy of officialdom, they contrived to have the Library of Congress award him the Bollingen Prize for Poetry. They did everything in their power to convince the government that Pound was either a lunatic unfit to stand trial, or a tragically-misguided “intellectual crackpot.” The broad consensus of the government was that he was probably the latter. Nevertheless, it was a fine line, and he had a lot of friends.

Even after all the efforts they made to win his release and rehabilitate his reputation, he dug deeper, associating with white supremacists and remaining an apologist for Hitler, a man he thought had a noble heart, but who took the wrong path. Narcissist that he was, he was probably describing himself. He lived long enough to see everything he believed in repudiated. He died small and pathetic, his “errors and wrecks” as he wrote, strewn about him.

But he could not be forgotten. He cannot be cancelled. He is still indispensable. No one can ever write about the Lost Generation without Pound at least being allowed to make a statement.